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He looks at me as if I’ve asked him to dance. “I beg your pardon?”

“ID. I don’t know you.”

“Young woman, I have been drinking in this building since before it had electricity.”

“Great,” I say. “Then it’ll be easy for you to prove it.”

Somewhere down the bar, a barback snorts.

The pale man’s mouth turns up at one corner, and I catch the white edge of a fang. He doesn’t look offended. He looks delighted.

Kit slides in beside me and says, very quietly, “Members carry a card. Black, silver sigil, like your invitation. If he’s got a card, he’s on the roster, and if he’s on the roster, he’s of age. Nobody gets a card under twenty-one.”

I look at the vampire. “You have a card?”

He produces one from his breast pocket with two fingers and lays it on the bar. It’s black, with a silver mark in the corner and a name I can’t pronounce. I check it the way I’d check a license, front and back, then slide it back to him.

“Thank you,” I say, and start building his Sazerac.

“Desmond never carded me once in fifty years,” he says.

“Desmond knew you.”

He leaves a hundred-dollar tip on a twenty-two-dollar drink and goes off toward the booths. Kit watches him go, then looks at me sideways.

“That was Aurelian,” she says. “He’s on the membership council. He’s going to tell everyone about you.”

By ten, I’ve found the problem with station three.

The drinks coming off that end look heavier in the glass than mine, and the well vodka at station three is half gone while mine has barely moved. The bartender working it, a lanky guy named Theo, counts his pours the way he should, so it isn’t him.

When there’s a lull, I take a jigger down to his station and pour a shot from his well vodka into it, the way the bottle wants to pour. It runs over the line. I do the same thing at my station. Mine stops right at the line and cuts off, the way a measured pourer should.

I pull the spout out of his bottle and hold it next to one of mine. They look almost the same, but his is a free-flow spout. The rest of the bar is using measured pourers. Somebody swapped them, or the supplier sent the wrong box.

“Every bottle on this station has one,” I tell Theo. “Every drink you’ve made tonight has had extra in it.”

Theo stares at the spout. “Since when?”

“No idea. But if it’s been a while, it’s been costing you.” I find the box of spare measured pourers under the bar back where Kit keeps them, and we swap all twelve in about ten minutes. Then I test each bottle into the jigger. Every pour stops at the line.

Kit has been watching from the other end. When I bring the box back, she takes the old spouts out of my hand, counts them, and makes a note on the inventory clipboard.

“I’ll tell Corinne,” she says. Then, after a second: “Good catch.”

It’s the first time all night she’s talked to me like I work here.

The troll comes in around ten-fifteen.

He’s not as tall as Tav, but he’s wider, built like a refrigerator. His skin is a gray-green that looks rough and cool, like the rocks at the bottom of a river, and two blunt lower teeth jut up past his lip. His voice, when he leans on the bar and orders mead, sounds like gravel going down a chute. He smells like moss and beer.

I pour his mead. He drinks it in one long pull, slams the glass down hard enough to rattle the bottles behind me, and orders another.

His eyes take a second to land on me. He catches himself on the edge of the bar when he sways.

“Let me get you some water first,” I say, and set a pint of it in front of him.

“Don’t want water.”